The present invention relates to the art of image processing. It finds particular application in conjunction with image enhancement, image smoothing, and other image improvement techniques for magnetic resonance images and will be described with particular reference thereto. It is to be appreciated, however, that the present invention is also applicable to improving digital x-ray images, computed tomographic images, nuclear camera images, positron emission scanners, and the like.
Medical diagnostic images have commonly been subject to image degradation from noise, system imperfections, and the like. Various image processing techniques have been utilized to remove the effects of the noise. See for example, "Digital Image Enhancement: A Survey" Wang, et al., Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, Vol. 24, pages 363-381 (1983). In one technique, each pixel was adjusted in accordance with the mean of surrounding pixels and the variance or difference between the surrounding pixels. Each filter enhanced pixel value g'(i,j) was a weighted average of the local mean and variance values: EQU g'(i,j)=g(i,j)+k[g(i,j)-g(i,j)] (1),
where g(i,j) was the local mean, g(i,j)-g(i,j) was the variance, and k was a constant that weighted the relative contributions therebetween. It is to be appreciated that when k was set larger than 1, the variance or difference between the local mean value, hence the contribution of the measured gray scale level of the pixel (i,j) was magnified. As k was set smaller, the image was smoothed or blurred as if acted upon by a low-pass filter. At the extreme at which k was set equal to zero, each pixel value was replaced by the local mean of the neighboring pixel values.
One of the drawbacks in this technique resided in selecting an appropriate value for the weighting factor k. The smaller k was set, the more the image was blurred and the more difficult it became to withdraw accurate diagnostic information. As k was set larger, edges and fine details, including noise, became enhanced. Frequently, in a medical image, the selected weighting factor k was too large for some regions and too small for other regions.
"Digital Image Processing by Use of Local Statistics" by J. S. Lee, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. (1980), recognized that a different weighting factor k could be selected for each pixel to be enhanced. Specifically, Lee suggested setting the k for each pixel equal to the square root of the ratio of a preselected desirable local variance to the actual local variance of the selected pixel. Although the Lee pixel variable weighting factor achieved better resultant images than the constant weighting factor, there was still room for improvement.
In accordance with the present invention, a new and improved filtering technique is provided.